Explore Essays and memoir
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To Thine Own Self Be True
David Flusfeder
‘If Shakespeare’s characters stand for anything, it’s for a slipperiness of identity.’ David Flusfeder on a dog named Shakespeare.
On Shakespeare and Aemilia Lanyer
Sandra Simonds
‘I gently propose that for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death we stop reading Shakespeare and shift our attention to the poems of Aemilia Lanyer’. Sandra Simonds on Shakespeare and Aemilia Lanyer.
Ariel’s Song
Romesh Gunesekera
‘It is to Shakespeare’s pages I return whenever I feel I am sinking. There I can be sure to find a lifeline.’
Fugee
Hawa Jande Golakai
‘Now we’ve fizzled into a ridiculous unsaid, a flaccid tale of love, or lack thereof, in the time of Ebola.’
Torn Silk and Garlands of Garlic
Teffi
Teffi remembers the Armenian refugees in Novorossiisk during the Russian Revolution.
Possible
Wendell Steavenson
‘I don’t know how to think about this. How to stretch compassion for one person into a million.’ Wendell Steavenson on Europe’s migrant-refugee crisis.
First Sentence: Eliza Griswold
Eliza Griswold
‘This, of course, was years before anyone knew or cared who Boko Haram was.’
Crossings
Tim Beckett
‘This was the collective trauma of a community discovering, very abruptly, they’d have to uproot their lives.’ Tim Beckett on the ruins of Uranium City.
Violence in Blue
Patrick Ball
‘One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.’
Five Things Right Now: Diane Cook
Diane Cook
Diane Cook shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
The Fencing Master
David Treuer
David Treuer on learning to fence with Maître Michel Sebastiani and learning to write with Toni Morrison.
